Arcade Paradise is a brilliant subversive story of growing, nostalgia, chores and arcade games. A game, somehow, that starts mostly with you doing laundry was more profound than many of the recent visual novels I’ve watched. The game is slow to start, with the primary focus on earning money and casually playing what’s available. Yet, as the game continues and more features unlock, it becomes something much more. The basic premise is that you’re working at your dad’s laundromat. You clean, handle the drop-off laundry and collect cash from the coin exchanger. In the back is an arcade, where you can also collect the cash from the coin hopper. The first haul is huge, leading to an adventure to build an arcade in the rear of the laundromat against the dad’s wishes. The game’s subversion, I’ll explain later, but first let me talk about the authenticity of the nostalgia. If…
Boti: Byteland Overclocked is a 3D platformer that satisfies every itch that 3D platformers have to scratch. There’s collectables, challenging platforming, an easier linear path where you can avoid the optional challenging content. The controls are tight, the power-ups are fun and the level designs are very cheery and positive. Humor-wise the game lands its jokes softly as you run through a cybernetic future. It’s about 10-14 hours of platforming joy, if you absolutely love games like Astro’s Playroom or Tinykins then this game will definitely charm you. There’s a lot of negative reviews on Steam focusing on bugs, but throughout our playthrough we didn’t experience any. One big thing, if you’re looking for a game to play co-op with someone else this is definitely one of those amazing co-op games that you can pick up and just play without any frustration. If you’re looking for a new couch co-op…
ABRISS is a beautiful puzzle game that is engaging both visually and auditorily. It’s a thrill to work level by level and engage various Rube Goldberg-esq contraptions to destroy the level. It’s even more thrilling to replay each level to perfect your build and get a higher completion rate. Ultimately, for the price, ABRISS is a must buy if you love puzzle games, demolition and kickin’ rad audio. Destruction & Controlled Mayhem ABRISS has you place various items in the game to fall, move or be controlled to destroy various red targets. Each level has a more or less ideal solution to it but there’s some room to be creative past the tutorial levels. There’s definitely room to tighten up your build to destroy more and get a higher score or better shots in the photo mode / gif creator. The game doesn’t have a story or depth or tricks…
Inkulinati is imaginative, playful and strategic as it builds on colorful ancient memes to provide a strategy puzzler that has the most artistic vibe of any game we’ve seen in awhile. While the art isn’t uniquely rendered, gorgeously deep or unique in any way beyond its ability to While in early access, Inkulinati has impressed us since launch with how beautiful the art is brought to life and the artistic style of how the game plays out. There’s a lot to like here and the early access game is on PC Game Pass (as of this early review) so definitely worth a look there if anything in this review interests you. This review is of the early access version, update 3 (late August 2023). Art to Life The fun of the game is the art style. The characters are all drawn beautifully with rich color and really respect the roots…
Arcadegeddon is a colorful mashup of arcade nostalgia and roguelike action that mostly succeeds thanks to its vibrant style, frantic gameplay, and reverence for gaming’s past. Arcadegeddon is effectively if you took Risk of Rain 2 and removed the sadder overtones and replaced them with a Saturday morning cartoon gamer vibe aesthetic. The music is absolutely worth the price of admission alone. We recommend this game, if you’re wondering why read on below. You play alongside Gilly, a likeable underdog trying to save his retro arcade from being bulldozed by the evil Fun Fun Co corporation. To drum up interest and funds, Gilly cleverly hacks together the greatest hits of arcade gaming into one super game called Arcadegeddon. However, Fun Fun Co retaliates by injecting a virus that corrupts the creation. Now it’s up to you and friends to dive in and exterminate the bugs overrunning Gilly’s digital dream. The…
You should play Mondealy if you have the chance to. That’s our review. If you want to know why we say that, read on, but ultimately, we’re going to tell you to play Mondealy. If you don’t like visual novels, that’s fine. If you don’t like pixel art, that’s fine. If you don’t like indie games, that’s fine. Go play it. That’s as high of an honor as a game can get from us and we’ll gladly hand it to this year’s best visual novel adventure game. Mondealy is a journey of friendship in a weird world that exists slightly below our own. The best way to describe is what happens in Undertale if the barrier went down but no one left and classism is at the top of the discussion list. Modern culture weaves through with love and affection as Michael journeys through a world that evokes both nostalgia…
The wacky moving simulator Moving Out was a hit, so naturally the devs at SMG Studio cooked up a bigger, better, and even more chaotic sequel. Moving Out 2 takes the ridiculous physics-based gameplay we loved from the original and turns everything up to 11, delivering double the content and a whole lot more over-the-top action. To put it simply if you’re looking for something like Moving Out or Overcooked, then you need to get Moving Out 2. The improvements to the game are well worth the cost. It can get repetitive yes and some of the later levels are eh, but Moving Out 2 is 2023’s best cooperative game released so far this year. In a genre that needs more, it delivers. Massive improvement as well to Moving Out 1! What was to me at least an already great game has gotten better. Let’s check out some high-level reasons…
Adore’s combat is groundbreaking, intuitive and different from creature summoning games that have been needed for a long time. The latest update and full release have shown a polished strategic pet summoning game that has ARPG elements, rogue-like elements and something different than turn-based pet combat. If you’re big into pet games, you shouldn’t take my word for it and head on over to the Adore steam page to start checking the game out yourself – we recommend it. You summon a team of four creatures who fight for you. Your main character can’t actually engage in battle directly, only dodge and you don’t have absolute control over your summons. You’ve got to involve a lot of strategy and tactics to get through combat and what appears to be simple gameplay unravels as you move deeper into the game. If you played the game early in early access, you will…
The Life of a Magical Circle is the first game from Solideo, a one-person indie game development studio looking to focus on more philosophical games. Their first title definitely doesn’t disappoint, taking the general aesthetics of Geometry Wars, with the frustrations of Getting Over It, dashing in a bit of roguelike and philosophy with dynamic music, narration and lots of intent. There is a lot to what is overall a rather simplistic game. There’s just a circle, it’s a bit hard to control and there are things that you don’t want to hit. There are some collectibles. There’s not a lot going on until things start to advance and the narrator starts to provide color to the world you’re playing within. Soon you’re trying to figure out what each collectable does and what you’re wanting to collect and not along with the true meaning behind the journey. Intentional Design Simple…
Everspace 2 is a beautifully crafted massive open world first person space shooter action RPG with tight controls and a lot of fast paced action. ROCKFISH Games, a small independent studio, have overdelivered in their sequel to Everspace. This time, instead of being a roguelike, the game follows more along an ARPG path where you’re exploring a vast open world with easily 50+ hours of content. It is easily worth the price of admission at full price but let’s dig a bit deeper into that. To be perfectly clear – Everspace 2 is not a roguelike unlike Everspace, although Everspace 2 is much more like an ARPG, i.e., Diablo in space with an open world like Freelancer. So Much Good Content Everspace 2 has so many areas to visit that it can be overwhelming and all of them have different aesthetics and vibes. That’s important that the content is good,…